Federal History 2021

Federal History: Journal of the Society for History in the Federal Government 13: 2021 is available online.  Here’s the TOC:

Editor’s Note
Benjamin Guterman

Roger R. Trask Lecture
Bill Williams

The Case for John Jay’s Nomination as First Chief Justice
Benjamin Lyons

“This disease . . . knows no State boundaries”: The 1918 Spanish Influenza Epidemic and Federal Public Health
Jonathan Chilcote

“America must remain American”: The Liberal Contribution to Race Restrictions in the 1924 Immigration Act
Kevin Yuill

The Combined Chiefs of Staff and the Public Health Building, 1942–1946
Christopher Holmes

Federalism and the Limits on Regulating Products Liability Law, 1977–1981
Ian J. Drake

Gerald Ford’s Clemency Board Reconsidered
Alan Jaroslovsky

Interview An Interview with Chandra Manning
Benjamin Guterman

--Dan Ernst

Chin and Finkelman on Birthright Citizenship and the Slave Trade

Gabriel Jackson Chin, University of California, Davis School of Law, and Paul Finkelman, Gratz College, have posted Birthright Citizenship, Slave Trade Legislation, and the Origins of Federal Immigration Regulation, which is forthcoming in volume 54 of the UC Davis Law Review (2021):

In accord with the traditional restriction of citizenship of nonwhites, for decades some conservative lawmakers and scholars have urged Congress to deny citizenship to U.S.- born children of unauthorized migrants. For its part, the Trump Administration has promised to pursue birthright citizenship “reform.” The most prominent and compelling argument that Congress can deny citizenship by statute notwithstanding the citizenship clause of the Fourteenth Amendment comes from Citizenship Without Consent, a book authored by Yale Law Professor Peter Schuck and then-Yale Political Science Professor Rogers Smith. They argue that there was no federal exclusion or deportation in 1868 and thus the Fourteenth Amendment simply did not contemplate the citizenship of children of the then non-existent category of “illegal aliens.” Hundreds of law review articles, op-eds, white nationalist listservs, congressional hearings, and bills have embraced this argument, often citing Citizenship Without Consent.

This article is the first to examine the law regulating, suppressing, and banning the African slave trade to demonstrate, contrary to Citizenship Without Consent, that throughout the period leading up the Civil War and the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, the United States had both immigration laws and unauthorized migrants in the modern sense. First, the slave trade laws used immigration regulation techniques, including interdiction, detention, and deportation. Second, they were designed to exclude undesirable migrants and shape the nation’s population. Persons trafficked illegally could be and were deported, but, as Congress well knew, some were successfully smuggled in the country and remained here. Because the children of unauthorized migrants born in the United States were unquestionably made citizens by the Fourteenth Amendment, any modern statute denying citizenship to the children of undocumented migrants would be unconstitutional. In addition, scholars must consider the slave trade laws as part of the origins of federal immigration regulation.

–Dan Ernst

AHA Event on the "Roots and Consequences of America’s 1921 Immigration Act"

On February 23, 2021, at 2 p.m. EST, the American Historical Association will host an event titled “Our Country Is Full”: Roots and Consequences of America’s 1921 Immigration Act 100 Years Later." 

Chair: Erika Lee, University of Minnesota 

Panel: Ashley Johnson Bavery, Eastern Michigan University; Linda Gordon, New York University; Alexandra Minna Stern, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

100 years ago, the US passed the Emergency Quota Act of 1921. Together with the 1924 Immigration Act, it inaugurated an unprecedented era of immigration restriction and discrimination in immigration law. With xenophobia on the rise globally, this timely roundtable will explore the roots and the consequences of immigration restriction.

Joint with the Immigration and Ethnic History Society and the Committee on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender History.

Register here.

-- Karen Tani

AJLH 60:3

American Journal of Legal History 60: 3 (September 2020) has been published.
 
The Southern and Western Prehistory of “Liberty of Contract”: Revisiting the Path to Lochner in Light of the New History of American Capitalism  
Gabrielle E Clark
 
Race and Relevance: Arthur Garfield Hays and the Integration of the American Bar Association, 1938-1943    
Richard F Hamm
 
Citizenship in Empire: The Legal History of U.S. Citizenship in American Samoa, 1899-1960
Ross Dardani
 
Gendering Citizenship and Decolonizing Justice in 1960s Ghana: Revisiting the Struggle for Family Law Reform    
Kate Skinner
 
Book Reviews
 
Katie Donington, The Bonds of Family: Slavery, Commerce and Culture in the British Atlantic World    Matilde Cazzola
 
Sam Erman, Almost Citizens: Puerto Rico, the U.S. Constitution, and Empire    
Taylor Lauren Frazier
 
Susan Bartie, Free Hands and Minds: Pioneering Australian Legal Scholars    
Fiona Cownie

Chin, "A Nation of White Immigrants: State and Federal Racial Preferences for White Noncitizens"

The Boston University Law Review has published "A Nation of White Immigrants: State and Federal Racial Preferences for White Noncitizens," by Gabriel Jackson Chin (University of California, Davis). The abstract:

U.S. law, of course, drew many lines based on race from the earliest days of slavery and colonialism. It is also well known that the government discriminated against noncitizens in favor of citizens in areas such as licensing and land ownership. This Article proposes that during the long Jim Crow era, there was an additional body of racially discriminatory state and federal law that discriminated against noncitizens of particular disfavored races. This body of law has not been fully recognized or described. Because the federal government and many state governments had policies encouraging white immigration, they sought methods to discriminate against nonwhite noncitizens, primarily Asians, without also burdening white noncitizens. The “declaration of intention” to naturalize, a required part of the naturalization process, was a key device used to effectuate this policy. Between 1790 and 1952, eligibility for nationalization was racially restricted, such that only members of preferred races could file a declaration of intent. Therefore, offering benefits to so-called “declarants” intentionally and effectively favored white immigrants. Hundreds of state and federal laws offered benefits to declarants with respect to a wide range of opportunities, including voting, land ownership, public benefits, military service, public employment, government contracting, and occupational licensing. This combination of state and federal law offered white immigrants in many parts of the United States an opportunity for substantial equality with white citizens from the moment they arrived in the United States, while it simultaneously restricted competition from—and maintained the subordinated status of—noncitizens of color. This body of law should be considered when evaluating the history of racial discrimination in this country and its present effects. 

The full article is available here. 

-- Karen Tani

CFP: Legal History and Mass Migration

[We have the following call for papers.  DRE]

Legal Response to Mass Migration Between the 19th Century and the WWII 

Confronted with mass migration, since the mid-19th century Western legal culture was forced to face migrants not just as a sum of individuals, but as a phenomenon demanding new legal concepts and mechanisms appropriate to govern and regulate groups and collective subjects. European migrants moving towards colonies and the East led to a reconceptualization of traditional international law doctrines on state sovereignty in order to de-territorialize Western citizens who occurred to be in the Eastern countries, freeing them from the imperium of the local authority and entrusting them to their own consular courts. Whereas immigration into Western countries led to the adoption of protective legal strategies and exclusion mechanisms to bar the dangerous others, emigration of European citizens towards colonized regions and Eastern countries prompted the elaboration of exceptional safeguards and privileges for ‘civilizing’ migrants. The new challenges of mobility led jurists and legislators to reshape the peculiarity of ius migrandi through terminological as well as conceptual revisions (e.g. the notions of citizenship, sovereignty, territorial state, undesirable and dangerous alien), the elaboration of new disciplines such as international labor law and international migration law, and the creation of special administrative bodies or jurisdictions (e.g. immigration officers; board of inspectors; consular courts; inspectors of emigration; arbitral commissions for emigration).

The Legal History and Mass Migration project (PRIN 2017) invites proposals for papers relating to the theme of the juridical response to mass migration between the mid-19th century and WWII. Papers can be based on different methodologies and may refer to a broad variety of subjects, including, by way of example:

• application of methodologies such as global legal history, comparative legal history, critical analysis of law to the study of migration issues;

• relationship between local rules and international migration law;

• tensions between human rights’ recognition and border control policies;

• non-Western legal approaches to migration issues;

• construction of legal discourses, theories, justifications to support, contrast, govern, or limit mass migration;
  

• models of citizenship and integration or exclusion of alien immigrants in different countries;

• role of case law and/or resort to special tribunals with jurisdiction in migration issues as means of departing from ordinary rules and constitutional protections;
  

• institutional and informal mechanisms (such as ‘soft law’, role of unions or charitable institutions, nets of assistance of national citizens abroad etc.) adopted to deal with mass migration problems in different countries of both departure and destination;

• impact of mass migration on national and international labour law;

• racial paradigms and immigration laws;
  

• local/global economic impact of migration and its legal regulation;

• exploitation of criminal law concepts, discourses, practices to stir the public conviction about the social danger of mass migration

Proposals for papers are due by 30 March 2021 and should be submitted by e-mail at legalhistoryandmassmigration@gmail.com in Word format, following this order: (a) author(s); (b) affiliation; (c) e-mail address; (d) title of abstract; (e) body of abstract (apx 350 words).  Accepted papers will be presented at an international conference which will be held at the University of Naples in December 2021.  

Support for selected participants: funding for travel expenses and accommodation may be available. Please indicate with your paper proposal if you would like to be considered for a support, and if so, your expected expenses. All funding decisions will be made independently of paper acceptance.
Papers and pre-circulation: Please note that the conference panels will be structured around a short summary of speakers’ pre-circulated papers, followed by more extended discussion. It is our intention that accepted speakers will submit papers of no more than 4,000 words for circulation by Friday 22 October 2021.

For general inquiries, please email: info@legalhistoryandmassmigration.com

Conference Committee: Luigi Nuzzo (University of Salento), Michele Pifferi (University of Ferrara), Giuseppe Speciale (University of Catania), Cristina Vano (University of Naples Federico II).

Cox & Rodríguez, "The President and Immigration Law"

Oxford University Press has released The President and Immigration Law, by Adam B. Cox (New York University School of Law) and Cristina M. Rodríguez (Yale Law School). A description from the Press:

Who controls American immigration policy? The biggest immigration controversies of the last decade have all involved policies produced by the President — policies such as President Obama's decision to protect Dreamers from deportation and President Trump's proclamation banning immigrants from several majority-Muslim nations. While critics of these policies have been separated by a vast ideological chasm, their broadsides have embodied the same widely shared belief: that Congress, not the President, ought to dictate who may come to the United States and who will be forced to leave.

This belief is a myth. In The President and Immigration Law, Adam B. Cox and Cristina M. Rodríguez chronicle the untold story of how, over the course of two centuries, the President became our immigration policymaker-in-chief. Diving deep into the history of American immigration policy — from founding-era disputes over deporting sympathizers with France to contemporary debates about asylum-seekers at the Southern border — they show how migration crises, real or imagined, have empowered presidents. Far more importantly, they also uncover how the Executive's ordinary power to decide when to enforce the law, and against whom, has become an extraordinarily powerful vehicle for making immigration policy.

This pathbreaking account helps us understand how the United States has come to run an enormous shadow immigration system-one in which nearly half of all noncitizens in the country are living in violation of the law. It also provides a blueprint for reform, one that accepts rather than laments the role the President plays in shaping the national community, while also outlining strategies to curb the abuse of law enforcement authority in immigration and beyond.

More information is available here. A New Books Network interview with the authors is available here.

-- Karen Tani

Park on Self-Deportation in the United States

My Georgetown Law colleague K-Sue Park has posted Self-Deportation Nation, which appeared in the Harvard Law Review (132 (2019): 1878-1941:

“Self-deportation” is a concept to explain the removal strategy of making life so unbearable for a group that its members will leave a place. The term is strongly associated with recent state and municipal attempts to “attack every aspect of an illegal alien’s life,” including the ability to find employment and housing, drive a vehicle, make contracts, and attend school. However, self-deportation has a longer history, one that predates and made possible the establishment of the United States. As this Article shows, American colonists pursued this indirect approach to remove native peoples as a prerequisite for establishing and growing their settlements. The new nation then adopted this approach to Indian removal and debated using self-deportation to remove freed slaves; later, states and municipalities embraced self-deportation to keep blacks out of their jurisdictions and drive out the Chinese. After the creation of the individual deportation system, the logic of self-deportation began to work through the threat of direct deportation. This threat burgeoned with Congress’s expansion of the grounds of deportability during the twentieth century and affects the lives of an estimated 22 million unauthorized persons in the United States today.

This Article examines the mechanics of self-deportation and tracks the policy’s development through its application to groups unwanted as members of the American polity. The approach works through a delegation of power to public and private entities who create subordinating conditions for a targeted group. Governments have long used preemption as a tool to limit the power they cede to these entities. In the United States, this pattern of preemption establishes federal supremacy in the arena of removal: Cyclically, courts have struck down state and municipal attempts to adopt independent self-deportation regimes, and each time, the executive and legislative branches have responded by building up the direct deportation system. The history of self-deportation shows that the specific property interests driving this approach to removal shifted after abolition, from taking control of lands to controlling labor by placing conditions upon presence.

This Article identifies subordination as a primary mode of regulating migration in America, which direct deportations both supplement and fuel. It highlights the role that this approach to removal has played in producing the landscape of uneven racial distributions of power and property that is the present context in which it works. It shows that recognizing self-deportation and its relationship to the direct deportation system is critical for understanding the dynamics of immigration law and policy as a whole.

--Dan Ernst

Weekend Roundup

• 
  Julia Rose Kraut, the Judith S. Kaye Fellow for the Historical Society of the New York Courts, will speak on her book Threat of Dissent: A History of Ideological Exclusion and Deportation in the United States in the Washington History Seminar of the National History Center of the American Historical Association on October 14 at 4:00 ET.  From the announcement: "Kraut also highlights lawyers, including Clarence Darrow and Carol Weiss King."  Register here.
  

• The US Customs and Border Patrol has asked the National Archives to "designate as temporary all records regarding CBP’s dealings with DHS’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties: a recipient of complaints of civil rights abuses from across the department."  More. 
  

• The Docket 3:3 is now online.
  

• The Federal Judicial Center has announced "Spotlight on Judicial History," a series of “brief essays, posted periodically, on a wide variety of interesting topics related to federal court history.  The first, by Jake Kobrick, is A Brief History of Circuit Riding.

• Lorianne Updike Toler, Information Society Project, Yale Law School, has posted The Publication of Constitutional Convention Records, a “ short history of the print and digital publication of all records of the Constitutional Convention, from 1787-2020.”
  

• The recording of the National History Center's congressional briefing, "Financial Responses to Economic Crisis," is here. 
  

• You had us at "Hughes": Avoiding Post-Election Chaos: Wilson vs. Hughes, 1916 by Matthew Waxman (Lawfare).  Also: a video on the history of housing discrimination in Arlington, VA.

• Update: Rutgers British Studies Center is hosting Empires of Law in Colonial South Asia this Monday at 12pm-1ET for a Q&A session (register here) with Tanya Agathocleous and our blogger Mitra Sharafi. The video talks are posted here.

 Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers.

David's "Kinship, Law and Politics"

Joseph E. David, Sapir Academic College, Israel, has published Kinship, Law and Politics: An Anatomy of Belonging in the Law in Context series of Cambridge University Press:

Why are we so concerned with belonging? In what ways does our belonging constitute our identity? Is belonging a universal concept or a culturally dependent value? How does belonging situate and motivate us? Joseph E. David grapples with these questions through a genealogical analysis of ideas and concepts of belonging. His book transports readers to crucial historical moments in which perceptions of belonging have been formed, transformed, or dismantled. The cases presented here focus on the pivotal role played by belonging in kinship, law, and political order, stretching across cultural and religious contexts from eleventh-century Mediterranean religious legal debates to twentieth-century statist liberalism in Western societies. With his thorough inquiry into diverse discourses of belonging, David pushes past the politics of belonging and forces us to acknowledge just how wide-ranging and fluid notions of belonging can be.

Some endorsements:

'Not since Charles Taylor have scholars seen such a profound inquiry into the sources of selfhood and the nature of belonging in community. Joseph David draws on a stunning range of ancient and modern, familiar and forgotten figures to probe the depths of human nature and our essential bonds of marriage and family, friendship and faith, property and state. This is interdisciplinary and interreligious scholarship of the highest caliber.'

John Witte, Jr. - Director of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion, Emory University

'Joseph David’s book is an immensely erudite and deep exploration of the meaning of belonging and identity. David’s brilliant examination of the belonging and identity in their different layers and in diverse historical settings, is of fundamental importance to the understanding of the complexity of the concept and the vital role it plays in contemporary political and cultural life.'

Moshe Halbertal - New York University

--Dan Ernst

McIntyre and Milne on "Alien" Power in Australia

 Joe McIntyre and Sue Milne, University of South Australia School of Law, have posted The Alien and the Constitution: The Legal History of the ‘Alien’ Power of the Australian Commonwealth:

The identity of a body politic is inevitably intertwined with that of the excluded other. The quintessential political ‘other’ is the ‘alien’. The express constitutional power to regulate ‘naturalisation and aliens’ in s51(xix) has come to be seen as the hook upon which to hang the Commonwealth’s power to regulate Australian nationality and citizenship. Given the Australian colonies were obsessed with exclusions, and the Commonwealth’s roll-out of the White Australia policy as one of its first legislative priorities on immigration, this connexion between alienage and immigration (and thus eventually citizenship) appears inevitable. It is, however, historically wrong. This article argues that the scope and purpose of the ‘aliens power’ has been miscast, and that as a matter of history its true analogue was the races power, not immigration. The power was designed to regulate the domestic disabilities of aliens (and the removal of those disabilities through naturalisation), just as the races power regulates the disabilities of particular classes of persons. Moreover, and contrary to subsequent jurisprudence, the meaning of ‘alien’ at Federation was clear and unambiguous. This article unpicks the history records to understand this purpose and meaning at Federation in a way that challenges our contemporary understanding of Australian identity.

--Dan Ernst

CFP: Unauthorized European Migrations to the United States

 We have the following Call for Papers:

Unauthorized European Migrations to the United States

        We solicit proposals for papers that explore unauthorized European migrations to the United States. We anticipate a university press will publish the papers as a volume edited by Danielle Battisti, Associate Professor of History at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and S. Deborah Kang, Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas at Dallas. Prior to the publication of the volume, the editors and organizers will convene at the University of Nebraska for workshops and a conference pertaining to the volume.        

         The conference and volume will afford scholars from the United States and the world to explore the origins, nature, and significance of irregular European migration flows to the United States from the nineteenth century to the present. In so doing, we aim to expand our current understanding of the history of illegality in the United States. The volume intends to examine how and why thousands of European migrants adopted illicit migration strategies to circumvent restrictionist immigration laws; excavate the roles of race and racism in the production and representation of European illegality; explore the impacts of illegality on the shaping of migrant politics, social worlds, and domestic lives; illuminate the development of US laws, policies, and institutions pertaining to the policing of undocumented immigration; and describe the impacts of these migrations on European sending states, among other topics.

         We welcome scholarly papers based on archival research as well as conceptual pieces that think critically about theory and terminology. Papers might focus on a specific European migrant group or examine unauthorized European migrations to the United States in a comparative context.  Those comparisons might consider European migrants in relation to other migrant groups; or may situate unauthorized European migration in a transnational or international context.  Interdisciplinary perspectives are welcomed.

         We seek submissions from scholars in the United States and abroad and of any rank or affiliation. By November 15, 2020, please send project proposals of 500-800 words and a one-page CV to Danielle Battisti (dbattisti@unomaha.edu) and S. Deborah Kang (sdkang2020@utdallas.edu). The proposal ought to describe the research project and its connection to the themes of the volume and the conference. If selected, authors should be prepared to submit full papers (approximately 8000 words with notations) for review by September 1, 2021.    

Please circulate to your networks and colleagues. 

-- Karen Tani

Kraut, "Threat of Dissent: A History of Ideological Exclusion and Deportation in the United States"

Harvard University Press has released Threat of Dissent: A History of Ideological Exclusion and Deportation in the United States, by Julia Rose Kraut. Here's a description from the Press:

In this first comprehensive overview of the intersection of immigration law and the First Amendment, a lawyer and historian traces ideological exclusion and deportation in the United States from the Alien Friends Act of 1798 to the evolving policies of the Trump administration.

Beginning with the Alien Friends Act of 1798, the United States passed laws in the name of national security to bar or expel foreigners based on their beliefs and associations—although these laws sometimes conflict with First Amendment protections of freedom of speech and association or contradict America’s self-image as a nation of immigrants. The government has continually used ideological exclusions and deportations of noncitizens to suppress dissent and radicalism throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, from the War on Anarchy to the Cold War to the War on Terror.

In Threat of Dissent—the first social, political, and legal history of ideological exclusion and deportation in the United States—Julia Rose Kraut delves into the intricacies of major court decisions and legislation without losing sight of the people involved. We follow the cases of immigrants and foreign-born visitors, including activists, scholars, and artists such as Emma Goldman, Ernest Mandel, Carlos Fuentes, Charlie Chaplin, and John Lennon. Kraut also highlights lawyers, including Clarence Darrow and Carol Weiss King, as well as organizations, like the ACLU and PEN America, who challenged the constitutionality of ideological exclusions and deportations under the First Amendment. The Supreme Court, however, frequently interpreted restrictions under immigration law and upheld the government’s authority.

By reminding us of the legal vulnerability foreigners face on the basis of their beliefs, expressions, and associations, Kraut calls our attention to the ways that ideological exclusion and deportation reflect fears of subversion and serve as tools of political repression in the United States.

Advance praise:

“A must-read for those who care about immigration or the First Amendment. In clear and lively prose, Kraut charts how noncitizens are doubly vulnerable under American law: treated with suspicion as strangers, and subject to expulsion based on their political beliefs. Along the way, she forces us to reckon with a deeply troubling reality: freedom of speech has not been available for everyone.”—Robert L. Tsai

“I opened these pages skeptically, and then could not put them down. Threat of Dissent tells the rich and instructive history of efforts to protect America’s borders, first by legislation that excluded unwanted people, and then by legal and judicial challenges to those with unwelcome ideas and beliefs. An essential book for all concerned with US immigration policy and with the free expression of ideas inside and outside the nation.”—Alice Kessler-Harris

More information is available here.

-- Karen Tani

Weekend Roundup

• From Bloomberg Law, Nathan Perl-Rosenthal (USC), "The Birthright Citizenship Problem That DACA Can’t Fix." (And for more on this theme, check out his recent piece in The Nation, which we missed when it came out in June: "The Lottery: The Two Faces of Birthright Citizenship.")

• “The Projects and Proposals Committee of the American Society for Legal History invites proposals for the funding of new initiatives in the study, presentation, and production of legal historical scholarship and in the communication of legal history to all its possible publics and audiences.” More.

• Now in paper: Felony and the Guilty Mind in Medieval England, by Elizabeth Papp Kamali, Harvard Law School.

• Check out the Asian Law and Society Association's new website here. Nominations for ALSA book, article, and grad student paper awards are due July 31.

• From the Washington Post's "Made by History" section: Noah Rosenblum (Samuel I. Golieb Fellow, NYU School of Law), "The Supreme Court just made the president more powerful"; Lisa Levenstein (University of North Carolina, Greensboro), "History shows that we can solve the child-care crisis — if we want to"; and more.

• ICYMI: David Bernstein on why he studies constitutional history (Volokh Conspiracy).  Josh Blackman on that Field Docket Book (Volokh Conspiracy).  (For more on the docket books, this, this, this, and this.)  A review of Oliver Wendell Holmes: A Life in War, Law and Ideas by Stephen Budiansky (Law.com).

• Update: Blake Emerson on The Constitution of Social Progress at LPE Blog, part of a symposium on socialist constitutionalism that includes posts on Weimar by Willy Forbath and Samuel Moyn.

Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers.

Weekend Roundup

Charles Sumner (LC)

• Lucy Salyer (University of New Hampshire) posted "'It Has Not Been My Habit to Yield': Charles Sumner and the Fight for Equal Naturalization Rights" (HNN).

• Mary Ziegler (Florida State Law) on June Medical Service on NPR and in The Atlantic.

• Caroline Fredrickson reviews Sara Mayeux’s Free Justice: A History of the Public Defender in Twentieth-Century America (Washington Monthly). 

• The US Supreme Court's engrossed dockets from 1791 to 1995 are available here.  H/t: @SCOTUSPlaces.

• New and ungated in SAPD: Privatizing Employment Law: The Expansion of Mandatory Arbitration in the Workplace, by Sarah Staszak (Princeton University).

• From the Washington Post's "Made by History" section: Sarah Seo (Columbia Law) and Daniel Richman (Columbia Law), "Police reform won’t work unless it involves federal and state governments."

• Ruth Marcus, deputy editorial page editor of The Washington Post, was Chautauqua Institution’s 16th annual Robert H. Jackson Lecturer on the Supreme Court of the United States.  It took the form of a conversation with John Q. Barrett.  The two discussed her book, Supreme Ambition: Brett Kavanaugh and the Conservative Takeover (2019), as well as the Supreme Court, the Justices, and decisions from the current Court term.

• Larry Tye discusses Demagogue: The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy with Terry Gross on Fresh Air (WAMU). 

• Law Book Exchange has circulated a catalogue on Legal Education. 

• Harvard Law School has launched the new Journal of Islamic Law. It's a peer-reviewed, online journal with a special interest in data science tools and primary sources.

• The Historical Society of the New York Courts has posted a new podcast, a discussion about Chancellor James Kent with the Hon. Robert S. Smith.

• Jed Handelsman Shugerman (Fordham Law) on "The Imaginary Unitary Executive" (Lawfare).  Josh Blackman (South Texas College of Law Houston) takes issue with Chief Justice Roberts's references to Aaron Burr’s treason trials in Trump v. Vance  (SCOTUSBlog).  Kristin E. Tremper, a Ph.D. Candidate at Lehigh, offers a brief history of the Founders and public health (Salon).  Stephen B. Presser asks whether George Washington would have worn a mask (Newsmax).  And apparently Stone Mountain isn't going anywhere.  Ugh.

 Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers.

Goodman, "The Deportation Machine"

Princeton University Press has released The Deportation Machine: America's Long History of Expelling Immigrants, by Adam Goodman (University of Illinois at Chicago). A description from the Press:

Credit: @adamsigoodman

Constant headlines about deportations, detention camps, and border walls drive urgent debates about immigration and what it means to be an American in the twenty-first century. The Deportation Machine traces the long and troubling history of the US government’s systematic efforts to terrorize and expel immigrants over the past 140 years. This provocative, eye-opening book provides needed historical perspective on one of the most pressing social and political issues of our time.

In a sweeping and engaging narrative, Adam Goodman examines how federal, state, and local officials have targeted various groups for expulsion, from Chinese and Europeans at the turn of the twentieth century to Central Americans and Muslims today. He reveals how authorities have singled out Mexicans, nine out of ten of all deportees, and removed most of them not by orders of immigration judges but through coercive administrative procedures and calculated fear campaigns. Goodman uncovers the machine’s three primary mechanisms—formal deportations, “voluntary” departures, and self-deportations—and examines how public officials have used them to purge immigrants from the country and exert control over those who remain. Exposing the pervasive roots of anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States, The Deportation Machine introduces the politicians, bureaucrats, businesspeople, and ordinary citizens who have pushed for and profited from expulsion.

This revelatory book chronicles the devastating human costs of deportation and the innovative strategies people have adopted to fight against the machine and redefine belonging in ways that transcend citizenship.

Advance praise:

"Most books about deportation focus on formal proceedings conducted by the government. Adam Goodman widens the scope to consider 'voluntary' departures and self-deportations, which are far greater in number and no less part of the state's deportation machinery. A must-read for all those who care about the reach of state authority and its consequences for immigrants and citizens alike."—Mae Ngai

"Drawing on interviews and oral histories, meticulous research in more than twenty archives, and old-fashioned detective work, Adam Goodman offers a beautifully written and comprehensive history of US deportation policies. This book is a must-read, not just for students, scholars, and policymakers, but for all engaged citizens who want a fuller recounting of our national past."—María Cristina García

More information from the Press is available here. You can also listen to Professor Goodman talk about the book here, at New Books Network. The New York Times recently reviewed the book, here.

-- Karen Tani

Weekend Roundup

• The 2020 Andrew Carnegie Fellows have been announced. They include Rohit De, our guest blogger this month.

Stephen Field, J. (LC)

• The Supreme Court Historical Society has announced the acquisition of Stephen Field’s Docket Book for the 1885 Term.

• Over at the blog of the Historical Society of the New York Courts is John D. Gordan, III,’s post on his forthcoming article Judicial Notice on United States v. William Fullerton (March 1870).  The Society's webinar, Lessons Learned from the 1918 Flu Pandemic, is now up on YouTube.

• A historian’s and legal scholar’s amicus brief in support of the claim that people born in US territories have a constitutional right to US citizenship has been filed in Fitisemanu v United States (10th Cir.).

• The Law Society of Newfoundland and Labrador is seeking expressions of interest from its membership to fill a vacancy on the SS Daisy Legal History Committee, created for “the preservation of Newfoundland and Labrador’s legal heritage,” by May 19.

• ICYMI: Jed Shugerman on the Founders and the president’s finances (WaPo).  The Corrupt Bargain,” Eric Foner’s review essay on the Electoral College in the London Review of Books. Princeton's obituary of John Murrin and WaPo's of Barbara Babcock.

Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers. 

Bonner, "Remaking the Republic"

The University of Pennsylvania Press has released Remaking the Republic: Black Politics and the Creation of American Citizenship (March 2020), by Christopher James Bonner (University of Maryland). A description from the Press:

Citizenship in the nineteenth-century United States was an ever-moving target. The Constitution did not specify its exact meaning, leaving lawmakers and other Americans to struggle over the fundamental questions of who could be a citizen, how a person attained the status, and the particular privileges citizenship afforded. Indeed, as late as 1862, U.S. Attorney General Edward Bates observed that citizenship was "now as little understood in its details and elements, and the question as open to argument and speculative criticism as it was at the founding of the Government."

Black people suffered under this ambiguity, but also seized on it in efforts to transform their nominal freedom. By claiming that they were citizens in their demands for specific rights, they were, Christopher James Bonner argues, at the center of creating the very meaning of American citizenship. In the decades before and after Bates's lament, free African Americans used newspapers, public gatherings, and conventions to make arguments about who could be a citizen, the protections citizenship entailed, and the obligations it imposed. They thus played a vital role in the long, fraught process of determining who belonged in the nation and the terms of that belonging.

Remaking the Republic chronicles the various ways African Americans from a wide range of social positions throughout the North attempted to give meaning to American citizenship over the course of the nineteenth century. Examining newspapers, state and national conventions, public protest meetings, legal cases, and fugitive slave rescues, Bonner uncovers a spirited debate about rights and belonging among African Americans, the stakes of which could determine their place in U.S. society and shape the terms of citizenship for all Americans.

A few blurbs:

"Remaking the Republic is a must read for anyone seeking to understand how citizenship has evolved in the United States. Christopher James Bonner show us how black Americans were the first architects of national belonging in the early republic. His ambitious research tells a story about how they countered the racism of colonization schemes and black laws with a shrewd insistence upon their rights as citizens. This inspiring quest contains indispensable lessons about the past and for our own time."—Martha Jones

"By taking us inside black activists' multifaceted fight for inclusion across much of the nineteenth century, Christopher James Bonner has crafted one of the most compelling, comprehensive stories about black citizenship in all its many manifestations to date."—Anne Twitty

More information is available here.

-- Karen Tani

Weekend Roundup

• The Max Planck Institute for European Legal History invites doctoral students and young researchers to participate in study sessions on “the basic tools for beginning research in the archives of the Holy See and of other Roman ecclesiastical institutions as well as to provide elements for a critical interpretation of the sources and their contextualization through the most current literature.”  More. 

• Congratulations to Emory Law's Deborah Dinner and the other Law and Public Affairs Fellow at Princeton University for 2020-2021! 

• Robert Pigott on Elihu Root and New York City real estate in Judicial Notice, the journal of the Historical Society of the New York Courts.

• Over at Talking Legal History, Maddalena Marinari, Assistant Professor in History; Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies; and Peace Studies at Gustavus Adolphus College, speaks to Siobhan M. M. Barco about her book Unwanted: Italian and Jewish Mobilization against Restrictive Immigration Laws, 1882–1965 (University of North Carolina Press, 2020).

• The Influenza Epidemic of 1918 in the Library of Congress's Chronicling America. 

• Law in Times of Crisis at the University of Minnesota Law Library's Riesenfeld Rare Books Center 

• Have you checked out Annenberg Classroom's videos and other materials on the Constitution, including Supreme Court landmarks, including Miranda v. Arizona and New York Times v. Sullivan, as well as The Story of the Bill of Rights.

• ICYMI: A notice and query on the female lawyer Mary Anderson Matthews (1878-1948) of  Palmyra, Mo.  The quarrel over originalism within the right (National Review).  Charly B. Gay and Nancy Phillips on Constance Baker Motley in The Gramblinite.

• Update: WHYY and the Philadelphia Tribune on that Ken Burns series on the Constitution in Times of Crisis at the National Constitution Center.  Also: TR descendants heard from, here and here.

Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers. 

Paperless Citizenship in Cuba, Premo with J. Ermer

The final of this month’s blog posts, which have focused on paperless law and extrajudicial legalities in Latin America, ventures out of the colonial and into the modern period. This is an unvarnished attempt to grab the attention of you avid LHB readers who might not relate immediately to the topics of verbal contacts among seventeenth-century religious brotherhoods and dowry conflicts. To hook you, I again enlist a co-blogger, this time Florida International University History PhD candidate John Ermer, who is writing a dissertation about the Syrian and Lebanese diaspora (mahjar) in twentieth-century Cuba.  I wanted to ask John some questions that connect paperless law to modern citizenship cultures. (cont'd)